Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Chronicles of the Spouse: The Chemoing

Megan's chemo started last Monday (April 6). There were some rough spots this week after the treatment, but I would say that it was mostly a good week, all things considered. She felt fine on Monday after the treatment; she started to get tired around 7:00 p.m. and finally crashed around 9:00 p.m., but no nausea or sickness. She woke up on Tuesday feeling a little sick, but treated it with the first level of anti-nausea medication that she has been prescribed. She told me that she made it through the whole day on Tuesday without feeling too awful. Again, she crashed as soon as she got home, but no sickness yet.

Wednesday the other shoe dropped. She woke up feeling fine but her disposition quickly turned for the worse after she got to work. She had to go the third level of anti-nausea medication just to get to lunch-time. She came home during her lunch hour and slept for the rest of the day.

Thursday and Friday were better days; she came home about an hour early on Thursday but overall felt fine both days. Again, lots of sleep after work but nothing to call the doctor about after hours. Unfortunately, that all changed on Saturday.

Megan had some sort of bite/small wound on her elbow on Saturday morning. We don't normally pay attention to that kind of stuff because unless your arm is rotting off, spider bites aren't that big of a deal. Her elbow became a big deal, though, right before we went to the baseball game. That joint was radiating a lot of heat and had swollen and was red in color. By the time we got home from the game, she could barely move her arm at the elbow from the pain. We called the on-call doctor at the KCCC and he advised us to go to the hospital.

I'm sure Megan will want to tell this story, but the short version is that we arrived at the emergency room at 9:45 p.m. and didn't leave until 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Megan was diagnosed with an infected bursa, which apparently took over 3 hours to figure out. They sent us on our way with 3 new prescriptions and instructions to come back if her elbow got worse. Awesome.

This first week has been tough. Megan's mom stayed in town through Thursday, which was great because her motherly instincts took over and she took care of a lot of things that neither Megan nor I had the energy to deal with. Even with her help I felt drained of all energy nearly all of the time. I know that it's medically impossible for Megan's chemo treatment to physically effect me, but I'm almost as wiped out as she is most of the time. On a good day, my eyes are puffy enough so that I look like I have been in a fist fight when I wake up in the morning. This last week I looked like I had been repeatedly punched in the face by 10 different people. I'm not sleeping well at all these days; I normally get a solid 7 hours of sleep but I have been restless every night.

I learned this week that cancer affects everyone, not just the patient. I'm going to have to try a lot harder to share my emotions and feelings with Megan and my close friends. A friend of mine told me that he regrets keeping everything to himself while his mother was being treated for breast cancer and that I should absolutely not do what he did. I'm a stoic person by nature (probably to a fault) and talking about my feelings is very difficult for me, but I can already see how much of a mistake it would be to try and handle this on my own.

1 comment:

  1. You both are so amazing to be able to sit down and share what you're going through. We are all here for you guys, but it's so good to see that God is blessing you with the strength & love to take care of each other.

    Love you,
    Heather

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